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“Nothing Is Shown”: a 'Resolute' Response

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“Nothing Is Shown”: a 'Resolute' Response Philosophical Investigations 26:3 July 2003 ISSN 0190-0536 “Nothing is Shown”: A ‘Resolute’ Response to Mounce, Emiliani, Koethe and Vilhauer Rupert Read and Rob Deans, University of East Anglia Part 1: On Mounce on Wittgenstein (Early and Late) on ‘Saying and Showing’ H. O. Mounce published in this journal two years ago now a Criti- cal Notice of the The New Wittgenstein,1 an anthology (edited by Alice Crary and Rupert Read) which is evenly divided between work on Wittgenstein’s early and later writings. The bulk of Mounce’s article was devoted to those contributions primarily con- cerned with the Tractatus.2 There is a straightforward sense in which this selective focus is natural. The pertinent contributions – most conspicuously those by Cora Diamond and James Conant – describe a strikingly un- orthodox interpretation of Wittgenstein’s early book on which it is depicted as having an anti-metaphysical aim. Mounce takes an inter- est in this interpretation because he believes that, in characterizing the Tractatus in anti-metaphysical terms, it misrepresents the central Tractarian doctrine of ‘saying and showing’ – a doctrine which he understands in terms of the idea that “metaphysical truths, though they cannot be stated, may nevertheless be shown”(186). Mounce argues that Diamond and Conant et al. fail to treat this doctrine as “one that Wittgenstein himself advances,” and he claims that they therefore make Wittgenstein’s thought “less original than one might otherwise suppose” (186) by implying that it is “indistinguishable from positivism” in the sense of “not even attempt[ing] to provide positive knowledge [and] confin[ing] itself to removing the confu- 1. A. Crary and R. Read, eds., Routledge, London, 2000. See Mounce, “Critical Notice of The New Wittgenstein,” Philosophical Investigations,vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, pp. 185–192. All references in Part 1 of the text are to this article, unless otherwise stated. 2. See Part II of The New Wittgenstein (op. cit., note 1).The essays in Part I, in con- trast, are primarily concerned with Wittgenstein’s later thought. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 240 Philosophical Investigations sions which have been inflicted on us by traditional philosophy or metaphysics” (187). Moreover, although Mounce has relatively little to say about Wittgenstein’s later thought, he adds that he thinks the Diamond-Conant interpretation prevents us from appreciating the way in which the say-show distinction continues to figure in Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus writings (191–192). Mounce’s criticism of the Diamond-Conant interpretation of the Tractatus is clear and forcefully argued. It also derives a certain inde- pendent interest from its resemblance to other emerging criticisms – e.g., as Mounce himself points out (185–186), the one that P. M. S. Hacker’s develops in an appendix to The New Wittgenstein.3 Nevertheless, what we hope to demonstrate here is that, despite its initial appeal, the criticism fundamentally misrepresents some of the most basic claims of the Diamond-Conant interpretation, including its claims about the say-show distinction, and, further, that these mis- representations have a significance that extends beyond the Tractatus. One of Diamond’s and Conant’s goals in trying to isolate an anti- metaphysical strain of thought often overlooked in the Tractatus is to demonstrate the persistence (and development) of the same strain in Wittgenstein’s later writings. It follows that, to the extent that Mounce misdescribes the main concerns of their interpretation, he also inevitably fails to capture the kind of continuity in Wittgenstein’s thought that preoccupies them. A helpful, preliminary way to characterize what is distinctive about the Diamond-Conant interpretation of the Tractatus is to note that its proponents read Wittgenstein as accenting the idea – one they often represent him as inheriting from Frege – of the ‘primacy of the proposition’. The author of the Tractatus, as Diamond and Conant understand him, takes the proposition, or complete thought, to be the sole proper object of logical analysis.4 Thus, as they read him,Wittgenstein (to put it in terms Frege uses to describe his own philosophical method) does not “begin with concepts and put them together to form a thought or judgment” but rather “come[s] by the parts of a thought by analysing the thought.”5 To say that Wittgen- stein’s route to the parts of a thought is invariably through analysis 3. Ibid., chapter 14. 4. Wittgenstein of course progressively broadens Frege’s more tentative ‘contextu- alism’. See e.g. Read on this, on pp. 76–7 of The New Wittgenstein. 5. Gottlob Frege, Posthumous Writings,H.Hermes et al., eds., P.Long and R.White, trans., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979, p. 253. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003 Rupert Read and Rob Deans 241 of the whole is to imply that he thinks that our ability to identify the logical roles played by the signs that compose a sentence depends on our understanding of the thought the sentence expresses and, further, that there can therefore be no such thing as identifying the logical roles played by the parts of a nonsensical sentence.This means that Wittgenstein, as proponents of the Diamond-Conant interpre- tation read him, repudiates the idea that some bits of nonsense are logically distinct from mere gibberish6 in the sense of being pro- duced by clashes between logically incompatible categories, or ‘violations of logical syntax’. Now, Diamond and Conant et al. frequently describe this idea – viz., the idea that some sentences are nonsense on account of the particular illegitimate kind of thing their supposedly logically incom- patible parts attempt (but fail) to say – as the hallmark of a substan- tial conception of nonsense. And one of their chief contentions is that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein endorses a very different (and, in their terminology) austere conception of nonsense on which – however psychologically plausible we may find the thought that we are sometimes confronted with category clashes that differ from mere gibberish – all bits of nonsense are nevertheless logically indistin- guishable.7 Indeed, these commentators on the Tractatus maintain that if we are to read Wittgenstein’s book with understanding we need to see that this austere conception underwrites even his famous closing claim (i.e., Tractatus 6.54) that sentences of his book are nonsense. This brings us to our main objection to Mounce’s account of the Diamond-Conant interpretation. It fails to register the importance proponents of the ‘New Wittgenstein’ interpretation place on this distinction between austere and substantial conceptions of nonsense. Mounce simply situates his discussion of different interpretations of the Tractatus within a space of possibilities determined by (what Diamond and Conant et al. call) the substantial conception. He assumes that Wittgenstein thinks that metaphysical sentences are non- sense on account of the kind of substantial thing they attempt – 6. Such as, e.g., ‘ab sur ah’ or ‘higgly piggly wiggly’. 7. For references to treatments of the distinction between ‘austere’ and ‘substantial’ conceptions of nonsense within The New Wittgenstein (op. cit., note 1), see esp. Diamond,“Ethics, Imagination and the Tractatus,” pp. 153 and 165 and Conant,“Elu- ciation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein,” pp. 176–179, 185, 188–189, 191 and 195–196. See also below. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003 242 Philosophical Investigations unsuccessfully – to say. And, on the basis of this assumption, he declares that a central exegetical issue confronting commentators on the Tractatus concerns whether or not these (substantially) nonsensi- cal, metaphysical sentences are capable of ‘showing’ us things about the nature of thought and language that cannot properly be put into words. He thus arrives at the view that the only alternative to the kind of ‘ineffability’ interpretation he himself favours – on which Wittgenstein is taken to hold that metaphysical sentences illuminate ineffable truths – is a ‘positivistic’ interpretation on which such sen- tences are excluded from playing any illuminating role. And, since he recognizes that Diamond and Conant et al. are hostile to ineffa- bility readings, he concludes that they must be fans of positivistic ones. But this conclusion is plainly false. The trouble is that, in drawing it, Mounce in effect suggests that Diamond and Conant self- consciously attribute to Wittgenstein the very – substantial – con- ception of nonsense that they in fact take him to reject.8 Diamond and Conant read Wittgenstein as distancing himself from the sub- stantial conception of nonsense, so they reject both Mounce’s assumption that Wittgenstein conceives metaphysical sentences as substantially nonsensical and his assumption that Wittgenstein is con- cerned with delivering an answer to a question about whether meta- physical sentences, thus conceived, ‘show’ us things about the logical structure of language. Proponents of the Diamond-Conant interpretation are concerned to record the fact that, within the Tractatus, the notion of showing [zeigen] is never used in reference to nonsense [Unsinn] but only in reference to legitimate, well-formed propositions.9 Here we might recall two central Tractarian remarks on showing: Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it (4.121). What can be shown cannot be said (4.1212).10 8. Moreover, Conant himself argues exactly this case in some detail in his paper in The New Wittgenstein. It is surprising that Mounce missed this. 9. On this point, see esp. Conant, “Elucidation and Nonsense . .” in The New Wittgenstein (op. cit., note 1), pp. 178–179 and notes 11 and 20. 10. Here we draw on, and revise, both the Ogden and Pears & McGuinness trans- lations of the Tractatus.
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